A castle in the air

Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, must have spoken the mind of many at the 19th Convocation ceremony of Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, a fortnight ago  when he said the long-term challenge of funding university education in Nigeria should not depend on mere goodwill alone but on deliberate planning and looking inward. He pointedly advocated a revisit of the national education policy to make it possible for the children of the poor to have the best quality education.

To drive his point home, he advised Nigeria’s education managers to take a cue from the famous and up-beat Oxford University which at some point in its otherwise luxuriant history had to reverse its decision to admit only the children of the elite by creating a quota to ensure a worker with basic intellect had admission into the university.

In a veiled condemnation of the ever dwindling revenue allocation to education by all tiers of government, Oshiomhole wondered whether the $200 or its Naira equivalent being paid by an undergraduate per annum could deliver quality university education in the same clime where a child’s parent pays as much as N200,000/year for secondary school education but pays N50,000/year in a tertiary institution for another child of his.

To drive his point home, Oshiomhole attributed the same malady as being responsible for the propensity of an average Nigerian man to squander N1 million to serve the best culinary repast and choicest wines at his warped birthday bash but finds it extremely difficult if not entirely impossible to support his child’s education.

No wonder then that the Nigerian society appeared to have been strewn with what Dr. Adetolu Ademujimi described as education without character, warped and twisted morality as a result of which the Nigerian state is bedeviled with a high spate of armed robbery, drug peddling, kidnapping, different shades and shapes of terrorism, corruption as well as insecurity in the face of the multitude of its educated elite.

It is only a country with an unpardonably high dosage of education without character that could produce societal reprobates like religious extremists, internet scammers, accounting professionals who cook books, pharmaceutical firms that revel in fake and counterfeit drugs, legal practitioners that cut corners, Judges that sell judgments to the highest bidders to become what the late Hon. Justice Kayode Eso tagged ‘billionaire judges’ and doctors who forget surgical blades in the bowels of their patients, Journalists and musicians who praise-sing the worst in the society and deify them as heroes and models as well as teachers who spend more time outside the classrooms pursuing unholy pastimes, leaving their students unattended to.

Sometimes in the immediate past, The Nation’s Hardball painted a rather gruesome picture of the injustice education without character has visited on Nigeria.  Just look at the unpalatably irritating list: the most corrupt country in the world, one of the worst places to be born, a place of high infant and maternal mortality, one of the leading countries with the least school enrolment and a member of the countries with the most impoverished population as well as one of the countries with the highest polio virus prevalence.

There are some other seemingly elegant, but derogatory indicators like Nigeria being among the leading private jet owners, a country with the highest importation of rice and wheat despite its vast arable land, a country least conducive for setting up business and a country with the highest crude oil theft as well as being the country running the most expensive democracy in the world.

Traditionally, university degrees are awarded after graduating students must have fulfilled two paramount parameters/conditions: learning and character, with character coming before learning. In those days, if a student made a First Class in learning but scored low in character, the university would not award such a student its First Class because the university would not want to send a bad ambassador out to the world.

But today, how many of our universities can boldly say they award their certificates only to students who have been adjudged worthy in learning and character?

It does not end there. It is a well-known fact that Nigerians have an uncanny penchant to titles. They had since left the palatial palaces of royal fathers for the ivory tower, shopping for titles to satisfy and further inflate their already bloated egos. Unfortunately, the universities are ever ready to play ball by making these academic titles available for the highest bidders, not minding whether they are worthy and deserving of such titles in the first instance.

What does this picture reveal, particularly as education is a whole system of comportment, learning, dressing, character and respect for others?  Our educational system has lost colour and character and that is why the private and missionary universities have come in to fill the void as they are able to turn their students into total men and women who will fit into any position in life, no matter their course of study, be it Medicine, Engineering, Archeology or the languages and change Nigeria.

It is a well-known fact education involves a blend of three elements of the Head, the Heart and the Hand (the three H’s) and any society that fails to achieve this blend will end up producing half-baked graduates with certificates in learning who will be roaming the streets perpetrating all forms of crimes because they are bereft of character.

Because they cannot use their hands in small scale businesses, which will become big in future, they become over-dependent on the society, forgetting that their university certificates are not meant to secure jobs, but to make them all-rounder that can turn things around for good.

Nigerian leaders and followers, and particularly the students should always remember the mercurial words of Joseph Addison, an English Essayist, who once said that: “Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no enemy can alienate, no deposition can enslave. At home, (it is) a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude, a place and in society, an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives, at once, grace and government, to genius. Without it, what is man? a splendid slave, reasoning savage”.

If we are not to become mere splendid slaves and reasoning savages, we must appreciate the place and the import of education, garnished with learning and character, as a tool to developing a person into a total man.  For any parent to think he could pay $20 or its Naira equivalent to procure quality university education when some other parents are spending millions of Naira on their children at secondary school level is nothing but building a castle in the air. Indeed, it the equivalent of what the Master of the Rolls, Lord Thompson Denning, once described as building something on nothing. It will fall like a house of cards. Such bizarre and ludicrous investment is not only grotesque and calamitous, it is an unpardonable sin.

May we have the courage to plug into that which is just and profitable and may the wind of change blow in all directions, including our educational landscape.